The social impact

I'm not talking about social networking but rather about the socioeconomic impact. Social networking and e-commerce portals are literally transforming the socioeconomic scene. Income is being redistributed to small businesses through ebay and Amazon is offering a limitless marketing platform to small-to-medium retailers who sell on their website.

Even further, GupShup, an Indian twitter-like social network is launching a service that allows small businesses to organize targeted marketing campaigns via SMS. As described by TechCrunch "For example, business owners can use a ‘Keywords’ feature to attract new customers; the first step is to define a keyword and associate a phone code to it – for example, “To get cool discounts SMS PIZZA to 9220092200.” Users who send PIZZA to 9220092200 will automatically be added to this business’ customer list. Business owners can distribute coupons that can be redeemed at the point-of-sale location."

Technology and digital marketing is not only reshaping social interactions but also redefining the social impact of business to further empower small businesses and ensure a better distribution of income across the economies. And this is only the begining.